A Timeline as viewed in 4-Dimensions ~ Part 2 or, When the Lights Go Out at the Jules Bar

I may just have to place the “Jules Bar” onto Automatic Pilot for a while.

This would be for an amorphous amount of Time somewhere between a micro-second and approaching infinity.

I need to remember how to pick up a book and read.

Fear not, it will never be for infinity because that would be more than a while…

Automatic Pilot for the “Jules Bar” is a state not dissimilar to Limbo, but with the addition of some Dark Energy.

Not exactly Purgatory, more like an episode of the Twilight Zone :

You Are Going On A Journey…

A Voyage into Inner Space, on a Ship of indeterminate age and unspecified origins with a destination still waiting to be created.

You are traversing uncharted seas and there is no-one to take the helm.

A Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship sailing it’s storm-tossed banner under a grinning Godless Moon.

Where damaged Rats come out from the dark spaces of their loneliness to scurry along the endless corridors, darting hither and thither searching for morsels of human emotion.

Where fragments of faulty code flicker repetitively in the moonlight, whispering  random snatches of conversation, loops that run ceaselessly through the ancient oaken beams like synthetic Sirens.

There is a haunted, almost naked Ballet which is performed in silence each evening on the second floor to a grand, empty old theater with salt damaged stalls, and flickering candles for light.

Meanwhile inside the Captain’s cabin a cold tune festers in the damp blue half-light, wafting over books, scrolls and charts which are piled knee high upon the floor.

A dust enshrouded vivisection table protrudes from the darkness displaying  an ancient Astrolabe draped in cobwebs, and a Newtonian reflecting telescope missing a lens.

They claim the chilled air for Science, like mute sentinels among the test-tubes and lab equipment, patiently awaiting their Master’s return.

While on deck, whipped by furious gales from a contemptuous Moon, giggling lunatics scramble along the sails towards the Eagles nest perched at the top, howling their madness and tears into the merciless lashing sea-spray.

Insidiously, invisibly and silently, the contagion of a virtual spice drug has leached its way on board the Ship via a smuggled brass container engraved with the illegible markings of an unknown language.

In the virtual realm it is ultimately totally obsessive and thoroughly addictive.

This Ship is rapidly becoming your private Hell, as your mind relinquishes its grasp on Reason being no longer able to distinguish between what is real and what is not.

You glide in and out of abandoned cabins searching for meaning.

You are drifting...drifting...a frightened, flickering shadow in the half-light traces its way like a blind man across the cramped, hunched corners of your mind, as your eyes slip into the fissures and ceiling cracks of a Timeline without end.

A Timeline camouflaged as a vast sailing ship of old, one which appears to create each corridor and room on the Ship anew and on 'the fly' as one enters.

Echoing repetitive corridors of Hospital-green suddenly burst from the wall before you like a ganglion of subway tunnels.

A host of dead echoes claw at your ears like persistent crows, producing all manner of surgical smiles, confused sighs and hysterical cries as you drift by on the softly ebbing, geometric seas of checkerboard linoleum.

You catch your profile in a pool of oily water...a growth of cables and multi-colored wires have burst silently from the region around the input socket of your skull like spikes from a tropical flower, trembling as they eagerly await any new connections.

In the delirium of days that pass by unrecognizably save for a softly glowing Sun icon that rises each morning from a giant mirror in the Captain's cabin, you continue a frantic quest for the mythical 'lost' screen which, according to a service droid is believed to hold the only exit from this virtual anomaly.

By night you drift wearily through random echoing corridors, sifting through the usual cacophony of sounds and disconnected characters, listening breathlessly for any fresh new sounds which might reveal the hiding place of the ancient operating system and its wondrous clockwork wizardry, rumoured to lie somewhere beyond the incessantly chattering walls of the Ship.

Your only safe harbor has now caged you like a restless animal, it has trapped you on a floating prison of random and seemingly infinite doorways with meaningless signs of archaic looking script, and inhabited by Non-Playing Characters in a never-ending search for their Egos, as disconnected Avatars stumble about aimlessly in the flickering fluorescence having long since gone insane without their owners.

You are going on an endless Journey…

And these are just some of your companions as you travel ever onwards through Inner Space, suspended in time by an alien virtual-molecule inside of a faulty circuit, trapped forever, in the multi-dimensional fabric of the Twilight Zone.